Programming and Painting

As far as painters vs hackers goes, this is a topic which really lends itself to generalisations. They are fundamentally different kinds of person. Here's another attempted refutation of PG, just off the cuff:

Painters (artists in general) need charisma to succeed. It's rare for them to become deeply involved in complex bodies of knowledge -- this doesn't pay off because the audience for art resembles the general public: it's not specialized. Among artists, painters in particular think visually and spatially, but the most technical ideas they are involved with are usually to do with the practical chemistry of artists' materials.

Hackers are generally all about gaining knowledge of complex systems. They like to improvise and work in a self reliant way -- so, like painters, they are individualists. Do hackers pursue charisma? In a way, yes. The Unix hacker stereotype is a charismatic in a crude way (elitist, beard, sandals). But hackers are charismatic members only within a culture of technicians, and relative to that culture. Technicians are stereotypically not charismatic, or, at least, any charisma that they have is irrelevant to their effectiveness as technicians. This is essentially the cultural definition of a technician: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TechnicianVersusP...

Charismatics, with their Reality Distortion Fields, are sometimes mistrusted in the technical domain. Part of this has to do with the typically narcissistic or otherwise non-normative personality of charismatic individuals. That same pattern is absolutely expected and tolerated in the arts, painting especially.

So, the overlap between hackers and painters is quite minimal. The most painter-like hackers are the ones with the worrying large egos. The most hacker-like painters don't succeed as big name artists and end up teaching and pottering around with art materials.

What I enjoy about Engineering is that you have a set of constraints and you have the challenge of working within those constraints to solve a problem in a feasible manner. All most everything can be boiled down to an optimization problem, make this reactor use less fuel, make this engine deliver more power, make this component lighter etc.

To create my own (bad) metaphor engineering is about coloring between the lines in the most efficient way possible. Science is what draws the lines and engineering is what fills them in.